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    An Introduction to Hadrian's Wall: One Hundred Questions About the Roman Wall Answered
    An Introduction to Hadrian's Wall: One Hundred Questions About the Roman Wall Answered
    An Introduction to Hadrian's Wall: One Hundred Questions About the Roman Wall Answered
    Ebook118 pages50 minutes

    An Introduction to Hadrian's Wall: One Hundred Questions About the Roman Wall Answered

    By M.C. Bishop

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    About this ebook

    This book provides a friendly and accessible introduction to Hadrian's Wall in the form of 100 questions and their answers. Designed to appeal to all who have heard of (but do not necessarily know much about) this important monument, the themes covered include Building the Wall, Using the Wall, After the Wall, Visiting the Wall, and Understanding the Wall. It includes a select bibliography. Written by an archaeologist who has walked, driven, cycled, flown, illustrated, photographed and even excavated on Hadrian's Wall, this is the first of a new series of accessible guides to 'that famous wall'.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherM.C. Bishop
    Release dateDec 2, 2011
    ISBN9780957026117
    An Introduction to Hadrian's Wall: One Hundred Questions About the Roman Wall Answered
    Author

    M.C. Bishop

    Mike Bishop is a specialist on the Roman army, with many publications to his name including the acclaimed and widely used Roman Military Equipment (2006). The founding editor of Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies, he has also led several excavations of Roman sites.

    Read more from M.C. Bishop

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      Book preview

      An Introduction to Hadrian's Wall - M.C. Bishop

      AN INTRODUCTION TO HADRIAN’S WALL

      One Hundred Questions About the Roman Wall Answered

      M. C. Bishop

      Per Lineam Valli 1

      THE ARMATVRA PRESS

      First published in 2011 in Great Britain by The Armatura Press

      Smashwords Edition

      © 2011 M. C. Bishop

      All illustrations are © M. C. Bishop

      However...

      Text and illustrations are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) licence

      Design and layout by M. C. Bishop at The Armatura Press

      The Armatura Press, 34 Cobden Street, Darlington, County Durham DL1 4JD, UK

      www.armatura.co.uk

      THE ARMATVRA PRESS

      Contents

      Introduction

      Building the Wall

      Using the Wall

      After the Wall

      Visiting the Wall

      Understanding the Wall

      Bibliography

      Full contents

      Introduction

      Hadrian’s Wall is one of the best-known monuments in Britain. There are many books on the subject, although at the time of writing very few for any of the digital platforms. I therefore felt there was sufficient reason to produce a short introduction that answered many of the questions I get asked when I lead groups along or lecture on the Wall. It is not a profound academic work (but will point you to some that are) and merely rehearses some of the bigger questions, as well as some of the more obscure ones. Most are questions I have been asked at some time or other – the remainder intrigued me when I first started nosing around ‘that famous wall’.

      My own connection with Hadrian’s Wall started out reluctantly (it never interested me very much when I first moved up to Newcastle to work on publishing the excavations on the much-more-interesting Roman site at Corbridge). I have excavated on it – in what may well have been the world’s narrowest archaeological trench – in the Roman fort at Rudchester, the origin of my dubious claim to be the only living human being who has touched (scraped knuckles on: it was a very narrow trench) the headquarters building of that fort. I brushed up against the Wall again (figuratively, at least) when I was involved in the original desk-based assessment for the National Trail (which seemed like a daft idea to me at the time). More recently I have led walking tours along the Wall for Andante Travels (thereby disproving my earlier impression), as well as for the occasional academic or learned society. I have walked it, cycled it, driven it, and flown over it (almost always wielding a camera), but I have yet to swim it.

      Each question, besides a brief piece of text providing an answer, includes suggestions for further reading. I have not attempted any sort of detailed academic referencing system, but leave it to the reader how much they choose to pursue. Most of the references can be obtained fairly easily and, using secondhand bookshops (particularly via Amazon and Abebooks) and libraries, fairly cheaply and some of the most important – such as Symonds and Mason 2009 – are even available as free downloads (and in such cases I have provided links for them).

      Everybody’s Hadrian’s Wall is different. Mine is a wondrous, complex, utterly human, botched job that shows the pragmatic ingenuity and inspiring promise of bottom-up management, and that just happens to traverse some of the most spectacular scenery in the United Kingdom; what’s not to like?

      Special thanks are due to my alpha readers: Duncan Campbell, Martin Davies, Bill Griffiths, Bill Hubbard, and Lorraine Marlow, who read for content; and my beta readers, who also read for format.

      M. C. Bishop, Darlington, August 2011

      Building the Wall

      1. When was Hadrian’s Wall built?

      The Emperor Hadrian visited Britain, probably in AD 122, and it was under his governor, Aulus Platorius Nepos (AD 122–5/6), that construction began (Figure 1). We know the former fact from Hadrian’s biography (Historia Augusta, Life of Hadrian 11) and the latter from the discovery of a couple of building inscriptions from Milecastle 38 (Hotbank), as well as part of a third from Milecastle 42. We also know that the Wall was constructed and operational by the time it was abandoned in the early AD 140s upon the construction of the Antonine Wall (located further north, on the Forth–Clyde isthmus). Virtually all other dating for the construction of the system within that period of two decades relies upon informed speculation.

      Further reading: Breeze and Dobson 2000

      Figure 1: The course of Hadrian’s Wall and its principal sites

      2. Why was it built?

      The answer to this question was conveniently supplied in Hadrian’s biography, where it was said the emperor ‘was the first to construct

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